Further context on the Scott Adams thing lol: He claims to have taken hypnosis lessons decades ago and has referred to using it multiple times. His, uh, personality also seems to me like it'd be more susceptible to hypnosis than average (and even he'd probably admit this in a roundabout way).

Further observation about that second sentence.

I think deeply understanding top tier capabilities researchers' views on how to achieve AGI is actually extremely valuable for thinking about alignment. Even if you disagree on object level views, understanding how very smart people come to their conclusions is very valuable.

I think the first sentence is true (especially for alignment strategy), but the second sentence seems sort of... broad-life-advice-ish, instead of a specific tip? It's a pretty indirect help to most kinds of alignment.

Otherwise, this comment's points really do seem like empirical things that people could put odds or ratios on. Wondering if a more-specific version of those "AI Views Snapshots" would be warranted, for these sorts of "research meta-knowledge" cruxes. Heck, it might be good to have lots of AI Views Snapshot DLC Mini-Charts, from for-specific-research-agendas(?) to internal-to-organizations(?!?!?!?).

I can't make this one, but I'd love to be at future LessOnline events when I'm less time/budget-constrained! :)

How scarce are tickets/"seats"?

I will carefully hedge my investment in this company by giving it $325823e7589245728439572380945237894273489, in exchange for a board seat so I can keep an eye on it.

I have over 5 Twitter followers, I'll take my board seat when ur ready

Giving up on transhumanism as a useful idea of what-to-aim-for or identify as, separate from how much you personally can contribute to it.

More directly: avoiding "pinning your hopes on AI" (which, depending on how I'm supposed to interpret this, could mean "avoiding solutions that ever lead to aligned AI occurring" or "avoiding near-term AI, period" or "believing that something other than AI is likely to be the most important near-future thing", which are pretty different from each other, even if the end prescription for you personally is (or seems, on first pass, to be) the same.), separate from how much you personally can do to positively affect AI development.

Then again, I might've misread/misinterpreted what you wrote. (I'm unlikely to reply to further object-level explanation of this, sorry. I mainly wanted to point out the pattern. It'd be nice if your reasoning did turn out correct, but my point is that its starting-place seems/seemed to be rationalization as per the pattern.)